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Wayne, actually the only problem I had was that the text size attribute in the body element is not recognized at all. No matter what values I use, the body font stays at the default size. The paragraphs look fine. Sorry if I didn't phrase the question correctly the first time.

This site will be Intranet only for IE 4 and up, so at this point I am not worried that much about Netscape users. I'll remember what you said, though.

P {
font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
color:#000000;
font-size:11px;
text-align:justify
}
[/code]
The paragraphs show up as intended, but the body text doesn't. The text size doesn't change - am I doing something wrong? I am sure this question is answered some place on the web, but 4 days with 5 hours of sleep doesn't make me want to look. (y'all know that feeling)

also Netscape doesnt seem to support BODY tag at all. I am just trying to avoid using &lt;font&gt; tag in my site.

Take everything out of your paragraph tag except for the text-align:justify;. The rest of the attributes should be inherited from the BODY. If it works then your styles are working fine. In order to see Body text with styles applied to your paragraphs you need to have text outside your &lt;p&gt; tags.

Also Netscape has a very hard time with stylesheets. If you resize your window all CSS is abandoned. If you combine linked styles with inline (i.e. &lt;div style="...."&gt; ) styles Netscape will quite possibly crash. If your server doesn't have the mime type for style sheets set up correctly Netscape will either not use them or will crash. Netscape will also not apply styles to some elements, most notably tables. Never had a problem with the body tag though. Make sure your style sheets are set up to cascade properly insert them in your document like this:
Body
Div
h1-h6
P
A
B
so on and so forth. Your containers should be at the top and your misc. elements at the bottom. This why they'll inherit the styles of their parent elements properly

Your setting your font size to 11 pixels (font-size: 11px) instead of 11 points (font-size: 11pt). Try changing that and see what happens. Besides don't you think 11 pixels would make it very difficult to read?

The only thing I can see that I do differently than you do is to add a ';' after the last property for each element. I know the specification doesn't require that but I add it so that if I go in later and add new properties I won't forget the semi-colon and get errors. IE5.0 might be more strict in this than in the newer version.

Other than that the only things I can suggest are:
Making sure the Styles are loading by placing them within the physical document for testing instead of linking.
Try messing around with inline styles to see if it works.

When I start creating a site I put all of my styles inline. Of course this makes the files very bulky and unsuitable for publishing but it gives me the advantage of only having one file to modify while I fine tune settings and attributes. Once the site is done I consolidate my styles into groups i.e. all attributes for my DIV tags except those specific to a particular ID. These are placed into the head of the document to make sure nothing gets screwed up. Once I verify everything is still working then finally I cut the styles out of my document and paste them into their own file that can be linked in.

Please note that if you use Linked Styles, Inline Styles and Tables in a document and it is loaded by Navigator, there is a great chance it will crash especially if the window is resized. For more information you can read "The Day the Browser Died" on www.alistapart.com

Thanks Wayne, I will try to do that. As to Netscape - I already came across that problem once, so this time I will be more careful. But in this case I am not worried about NN too much, this site is Intranet only, IE 5 and up...

It seems like I tried everything you suggested and then some more, but the font size stays the same. I really want to use CSS to control it, though, because people with little web experience will need to update this site and I dont want them going into font sizes and types.... I am using SSI to do the updates.